GreenGeeks vs A Small Orange on Green Hosting Solution

Both GreenGeeks and A Small Orange are the eco-friendly hosting providers that ensure the high-quality hosting solution. In this case, when choosing between these two options, many of you may feel hard and confused. Here, we have made a GreenGeeks vs A Small Orange comparison in the following, with which you can easily learn their shortcomings, strong points, similarities and differences, thus be able to pick up the better one that can fully meet your hosting needs.

To get the comprehensive and objective comparing result, we have signed up with them respectively to have a personal testing on the quality of their service. In addition, as customer voices speak more, we have collected their feedbacks to know the customer satisfaction achieved by these two hosting providers.

Here, you can firstly have a look at their general rating from the below chart. Surely, GreenGeeks gets the better star rating than A Small Orange.

Similarity between GreenGeeks and A Small Orange

The most obvious similarity between GreenGeeks and A Small Orange is that they all try their best to offset the bad environmental effects brought by the hosting industry by offering the green hosting. To achieve this kind of hosting solution, they have done the following efforts.

Green Data Centers – Data centers require a large sum to electricity to control the overall climate, so these two web hosts all rent or set up the green data centers with the recurring cooling system. This can reduce the energy usage to a large degree.

Server Configurations – The server machines used by them have been carefully configured. In this case, all of these machines can work in a more efficient manner with less electricity consumption.

Green Office – These two web hosts all establish the green offices that come with various recycling systems. This can reduce the paper consumption effectively.

Purchase Some Credits for Wind Energy – This practice is used to compensate the massive energy usage and carbon emission brought by them. GreenGeeks, in particular, purchases three times of the energy credits to offset environmental effects caused by them.

Differences between GreenGeeks and A Small Orange

As for their hosting differences, we have summarized a lot of aspects, such as the hosting charges, hosting performance, technical support, features, uptime and many more.

The Hosting Charge – A Small Orange Is Slightly Cheaper

There is no doubt that A Small Orange is the cheaper option than GreenGeeks. This web host actually releases 4 plans in total. However, we only compare their Tiny plan and Small plan with the all-in-one EcoSite plan offered by GreenGeeks, for these three plans are within the same hosting level and are the perfect options for blogs, personal websites and some medium-sized sites.

Here, if you choose to sign up with A Small Orange, their Tiny plan will charge you at $2.92/mo no matter which billing cycle you choose and their Small plan will charge at $4.17/mo with the annual billing.

If you choose GreenGeeks, however, the hosting charge is a little bit higher that is starting at $9.95/mo initially. But now, GreenGeeks launches a 61% discount via this special promotional link, with which you can get a cheaper price that starts at $3.96/mo effectively.

GreenGeeks Promotion Link Activation

The Package Features – GreenGeeks Offers More Features

After checking the hosting plan offered by GreenGeeks, we have found that this web host includes a lot of useful features, tools, technologies and services into their all-in-one plan. Check some highlights in the following.

You can upload as many web contents as you want and increase the monthly traffic greatly with the unlimited allocation of SSD based web space and bandwidth.

You can host multiple sites on a single account with unlimited sub-domains and parked domains.

There is a free domain name that can be available for the whole life.

The 1-click script installer, drag & drop site builder and the cPanel control panel allow you to set up and manage your website effortlessly.

You can create an unlimited number of email addresses, email autoresponders and FTP accounts.

The MySQL database is offered with the latest version and can be controlled via the phpMyAdmin.

The programming languages of PHP, Python and Perl are all offered for some advanced purposes.

As for A Small Orange, they offer almost all the features you can get from GreenGeeks, except for some add-on features such as the Google Apps Integration, unlimited server resources and free SEO & marketing tools. In addition, the free domain name of A Small Orange is not available if you purchase their Tiny plan with the monthly billing.

Website Security – GreenGeeks Takes More Actions

When it comes to the website security, both GreenGeeks and A Small Orange offer the daily backup service to prevent data loss, SSL to ensure the risk-free data delivery, the leech and hotlink protection to protect your web content and images from been stolen and the password protection service to safeguard the private and sensitive information.

However, in addition to the above-mentioned practices, GreenGeeks also allows the real-time security scanning, spam assassin and automatic brute-force detection to eliminate the potential security holes and vulnerabilities.

Technical Support – GreenGeeks Ensures the Better Service

You can get the 24/7 technical support from either GreenGeeks or A Small Orange. After personally trying their services, we have drawn some conclusions in the following.

Email & Ticket Support – The key aspect for these two support channels is the response efficiency. As tested, the support staffs of GreenGeeks reply us within 15 minutes generally while those of A Small Orange always take hours.

Live Chat Support – GreenGeeks ensures an ultimately convenient live chat support. In the bottom of their official site, you can find a Chat Now box. You simply need to click it and there will be a person asking you “How May I Help You”. With A Small Orange, however, you need to firstly give your name, choose the support department, offer your domain name and enter what you want to ask. After that, the chat system always loads in minutes to allow you starting chatting.

Phone Support – GreenGeeks gives a hotline number that can be dialed all the times. A Small Orange, however, does not allow the phone support at all.

Uptime & Hosting Speed – GreenGeeks Achieves a Better Result

The uptime and hosting speed have a direct impact on the growth of traffic, improvement of online ranking and browsing experiences of your readers. In this case, both GreenGeeks and A Small Orange pay much attention to these two aspects. For instance, they all use the quality web servers to host your website, which come with the industry-standard hardware, SSD drives, RAID configurations and Intel branded processors.

Even, they all have multiple cutting-edge data centers to locate these server machines for the proper working. However, the difference is that GreenGeeks has 4 server spaces located around the globe while A Small Orange only has two spaces in the US.

To compare them for these two points in a clear way, we have started the online monitoring using two sample websites that are hosted by them. According to the result, GreenGeeks achieves a much better result with the 99.98% uptime and the fast server response speed of 375 ms only.

Summary – GreenGeeks Is Better

It is true that A Small Orange is a little bit cheaper than GreenGeeks. However, when choosing a web host, you also need to think about the features, security, support and hosting performance. As GreenGeeks does a better job for all of these aspects, we highly recommend you to choose this option.

I've been an experienced web developer, SEOer and technical writer since 2003. I worked in many international high-tech companies including Microsoft and Autodesk before 2012. Now I own a startup company in San Francisco, CA, focusing on developing websites and blogs to deliver exceptional results to global readers by leveraging the power of Internet.
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We get commission from web hosting companies for referral and advertisement. However, this does not affect our unbiased web hosting reviews and insights. We never allow payments to influence our judgement. We always work hard and try our best to help people find the best cost effective web hosting deals at an affordable rate.